Following the attacks on the World Trade Center I, like many New Yorkers, volunteered for the relief effort. I talked at my daughters' preschool. I visited with the families of Cantor Fitzgerald, a company that lost almost 700 of its 1,000 employees working in the towers that day. I am tempted to tell you stories about the people I met, just as I still feel drawn to read the “Portraits of Grief” feature in the New York Times every morning. These short biographies recall those who perished and give us a daily opportunity to rework a trauma that remains very much alive.
What I will do instead is focus a psychoanalytic lens on my actions as a way of illustrating how psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts can be useful and relevant in understanding an event that seems too enormous to think about and beyond the scope of what we usually think is the province of our profession. Especially for New Yorkers, there was no way not to be personally affected by this very public event that touched analyst and analysand equally. If I were to avoid being personal at all, I risked becoming intellectualized and affectively deadened. However, how I used myself varied, depending on the situation I was in.
In my office, with my patients, I needed to maintain my usual stance of relative neutrality and curiosity. Despite the mutuality of our experience — the deaths of almost 3,000 civilian neighbors and the destruction of a part of our city — I was struck by the way intrapsychic reality predominated over external reality. My analytic stance allowed me to hear how each of my patients reacted very differently to the same traumatic event. They needed me to listen to them in this way so their own individual experiences could emerge. For one patient, the attack was only another forum for competing with his sister. For another, it highlighted his sense of isolation from the rest of the world as he struggled to share in the grief that so many around him were feeling.
At my daughters' preschool, I listened to parents who needed to understand how to talk to their children. In this setting I wasn't a psychoanalyst, but the expert brought in to provide counsel and support. Because I knew many of these parents and they were not my patients, I was relatively open about my own experiences. I spoke about my own daughters' questions and how I was dealing with this overwhelming tragedy. I gave suggestions and assured one mother that her sons' game in which one played a plane and smashed into his brother, the tower, was actually a creative and healthy response.
Photo by Jacques Gourguection
In my work with the Cantor Fitzgerald families, who were meeting in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, my role was more ambiguous. My badge simply said “volunteer.” At this early stage, families did not consciously seek out counseling, but they did have powerful, if unspoken, needs. I had to engage them and be helpful in any way possible. I got water and tissues for a mother who had just lost her son. I sat with a woman, playing with her infant as she filled out a missing-person form for her husband. When these two started talking, I knew I needed to just sit with my own intense reactions and listen.
So here I was, using my psychoanalytic skills in a variety of different ways to help those in need. Why was I doing this? Going to my office was my job. Going to volunteer was my civic duty. But there was something else in the way I listened to my analysands, the way I felt compelled to go and talk to these families, the way my eyes were drawn to the “Portraits of Grief” each morning, in my decision to write this article. Why did I need to do these things, and why was the need so powerful?
In part, my need is a reflection of my humanity and my altruistic wish to help people. I need to connect meaningfully with others. In the face of the attack, this need was intensified as I struggled with my own fears. Like thousands of New Yorkers who gave blood or stood by the side of the highway to cheer firefighters and rescue workers as they drove down to “Ground Zero,” I needed to act in order to feel better.
However, a bit of self analysis in the cab going to the Cantor Fitzgerald Center one night revealed something deeper. The work I was doing did not just make me feel good; it made me feel special. I needed to acknowledge this “hidden” feeling. I needed to recognize the narcissistic, exhibitionistic, and selfish wishes that lurk below any tragedy. I even had to admit that there was a part of me that would have liked to have escaped from the towers so I could tell everyone how much I had suffered.
In order to survive I had to accept my own pleasure and my own envy. In this way I am no different from my analysands, the parents at my daughters' school, the families of Cantor Fitzgerald, or anybody else who did something after the attack. If we do not acknowledge our own needs, the guilt and shame can become paralyzing and toxic.
Psychoanalysis is always relevant, and psychoanalysts can always be useful, not only in helping others but also in giving meaning to experiences that seem inexplicable. What is critical is for us to acknowledge who we are, what we need, and how similar we are to those we connect with every day.
Matthew Silvan, Ph.D., is director of psychocutaneous medicine at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is a second-year candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.